


May We All Die Twice

by modiste



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-23
Updated: 2013-10-23
Packaged: 2017-12-30 07:31:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1015851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/modiste/pseuds/modiste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It occurs to him that ever since she arrived Grace had been slowly lighting a fuse underneath Small Heath and he, Thomas Shelby, had been handing her the matches.</p><p>Set after the Series 1 finale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	May We All Die Twice

He will admit, there were signs.

Rich family. He knows enough about the price of good woollen cloth to know that the coat she wore cost more than a BSA factory man’s monthly wage. Not for her Ada’s ready-made dresses or Polly’s hand-me-down finery - she’d been stitching them all up while professionally tailored. No one who turned up in Small Heath looking like that intended to be there for very long.

Protestant, obviously. Unionist, from the look on her face when he told her he would take her to meet the King.

The interest she’d shown in Danny, the smuggling, in all their various business operations. Flattering, initially, but persistent enough to make even Arthur wonder what she was up to.

The ‘phone she’d had put in at the pub, the week before Thorne got shopped.

The tiny scar on her forehead that suggested she’d seen blood shed, people wounded. Crossfire. Scores to settle.

Then there was the pistol she kept in her purse and checked was there when she thought he wasn’t watching.

There were signs.

 

\------

 

Her fingers are in her bag and around her gun in an instant, but it is with a sickening jolt that she realises where she left it - on the bar in the Garrison, with a promise that she’d fight Polly with her bare hands.

Her mouth forms words, words like _Please_ and words like _No, Not Yet_ but she can’t make a sound and instead she stands stock still, her lips in a little ‘o’, and the thudding of the slowing train and her heartbeat a roar in her ears.

“You have utterly destroyed everything your father and I worked for”, he hisses. “This is for you”.

She screams as he suddenly opens his mouth wide, arches the gun back over, and pulls the trigger, and everything that remains of the Chief Inspector is spattered across the station platform.

 

\------

 

The next day Tommy asks the men who drink in the Irish inn in Digbeth to turn over what they can find about her, for he seems to have got three IRA scalps to his name now and there’s not a lot either side wouldn’t do now to keep the Shelby brothers happy in the short run.

Protestant, as he’d always suspected. Airs and graces.

Mother died young. Younger sister maimed; they’d both been caught in shell-fire when the Brotherhood rose up at Easter, 1916 and Grace had been unhurt. Daddy was a Unionist, family man, upstanding pillar of his community. RIC. Killed by a Fenian bullet to the throat in County Cork a few months before the War ended.

There were rumours she’d taken principled opposition to the fighting, joined the Women’s Franchise League in Dublin and chained herself to railings.

A week after the armistice she washed up in London, drafted into Military Intelligence Section 6 by an Inspector Campbell, lately of Belfast, old family friend.

She’d completed her training behind the bar in a pub (so that part was true, at least) in Wapping in the spring of 1919, helping to hand over a cell of Bolsheviks who’d been stirring up the dockworkers to His Majesty’s Government.

So sooner or later she would’ve come for Freddie, too.

It was her who put a bullet in the cousin from South Armagh, against a wall, straight through the middle. Everybody at the Black Swan thought Tommy’d put her up to it. But she’d been feeding information about their stolen goods to the police and their Ulster friends for months.

It occurs to him that ever since she arrived she had been slowly lighting a fuse underneath Small Heath and he, Thomas Shelby, had been handing her the matches.

Her name, her real name, was Grace, though. She hadn’t lied about that.

 

\------

 

She arrives at her lodgings, blood-stained and weary-eyed, in London the following evening to find two things waiting for her. One is Tommy’s letter. The other is an urgent memorandum from the Home Office sent to all active operatives and policemen involved in the hunt for the stolen guns, congratulating Miss Grace Burgess personally on her integral role in their fortuitous retrieval.

The mysterious blonde barmaid who assassinated three IRA men in Small Heath with Tommy Shelby’s gun thus receives a name. Her name.

Inspector Campbell’s parting gift.

 

\------

 

Any reason Tommy might have had for stealing away before first light to the little hostel near Camden Lock vanishes upon finding Grace’s address leads only to an empty room.

His type-written note to her is crumpled in the wastepaper basket in a corner.

He sits with a slow cigarette on a bench in Regent’s Park and thinks:

 _Bitch_.

 

\------

 

She had made it to the telephone in the hallway, fumbling over the new number for the Garrison, before they came for her.

When they bundled her out of the van some time in the early morning and pushed her forward, still blindfolded and gagged, she could hear the metallic tang of wire against ships’ flagpoles, water slapping against wooden clapboards.

Wapping. The docks. To finish what she started.

In a few days, perhaps a week or more, she’ll wash up under Southwark Bridge, the pockets of her expensive coat full of rocks, face unrecognisable beneath a crust of salty Thames mud. She’ll be just another common whore, a witch, delirious on drink, cast into the murky night of the river by a sudden stab of her conscience, calling out to the Lord for forgiveness and receiving nothing in reply.

 

\------

 

He learns of the untimely death of Miss G. Burgess, 26, a few days after that of the police chief.

Unlike him, she only receives a line in the paper. Polly, very quiet, hands him the _Evening Despatch_ and her magnifying glass, and places a cold hand on his knee.

For a moment, everything turns red.

 

\------

 

Arthur, God love him, takes him to an Irish pub the other side of town, where there’s singing and dancing and red-headed whores and the whisky never stops flowing. Fight violence with violence, fear with fear, hurt with more hurt, that’s Arthur’s way.

“Fuckin’ Proddie snitch”, he keeps saying. “Forget ‘er, Tommy. She’s nothing. Nothing.”

It’s only the next morning, when he wakes up in the gutter outside the pub, soaked in his own blood and sweat and salty tears, that he realises raising the whole place together in a toast with the words: “May you be in heaven a full half hour...” may not have been a good idea for a man with razor blades sewn into his cap and a gaping hole where his heart used to be.

 

\------

 

He’d met Charlie outside Grace’s front door as the sun rose, coat collar up and cap pulled low over his eyes.

“Coast’s clear, Tommy. That copper from Belfast called it all off late last night when he heard you were with the girl. Best lay low for a bit now though, eh?”

She was pouring him a cup of tea, back to the door, when he came in. The early morning sun had rested for a moment on her hair, still mussed up, and it struck him that he’d never seen anything more beautiful.

“Next time I’ll make sure I have some biscuits.”

They grinned shyly at each other. “Oh, I think we can make do without.”

She’d handed him the cup, straightened his shirt collar. “You’ll be alright now, Tommy?”

“I’ve some things I need to see to. Couple of days out of the city should do it.”

“And then?”

“I’ll be back soon enough.” A sigh. “Billy Kimber is waiting.”

He’d put the tea down, brushed a hair away from her face. “Thank you”, he said softly.

She’d looked at him for a moment, studying him almost. “Yes”, she’d said, finally.

“What?”

“Yes. I can help you. With everything.” She’d kissed his hand. “We’ll help each other.”

 

\------

 

In the new year he asks around in Dublin about her again, keeps unravelling her strings. He can’t help himself.

She’d had an older brother, Jesse, blonde, green-eyed, cocky, winning smile. Blown to bits in the mud and barbed wire at Thiepval with the rest of the 36th Ulster Division.

Before that there was a fiancé: Lieutenant Patrick O’Donnell. Good Anglo-Irish stock, decent hunting family, stables; heir to a large but unpretentious country estate in Derry. Stupidly got himself killed by a Jerry sniper in Ypres in March 1915.

So he supposes when they met the War had left neither of them unscathed.

Walking wounded.

 

\------

 

Christmas, 1921.

Things in Small Heath carry on as normal.

In the spring Freddie finally agreed to take Ada, Karl, and baby Len (his mother, stamping her satin heels down, had refused to let the priest add the ‘-in’ at the christening) to New York.

Tommy had pulled some strings and found an opening for him as a columnist for a worker’s newspaper run out of a tenement building on the Lower East Side, where the Commies and the Jews and the Italian anarchists sit down and plot revolution together. So Freddie will finally have an audience and maybe Ada could at last get some peace.

He leaves John and Esme, overseen by Pol, in charge of the racetrack pitches.

Soon they make enough to sell up and move to one of the high-ceilinged Victorian terraces nearer the centre of town. Respectable.

Arthur makes a go of the Garrison. That autumn, closely supervised by Harry, he manages to pour a pint that’s more ale than foam. They even found themselves in the black. Polly finds them a new bar girl, one of Lizzy Stark’s lot, raven-haired, mouthy, with no singing voice to speak of, which he’s grateful to her for.

So things carried on as they had done in Small Heath.

Only this year Tommy had had other plans.

And so it is that Mr. Thomas Shelby - landlord, investor, club-owner, legal bookkeeper, nasty bastard, fearsomely good shot, protector of the dissolute and the oppressed, would cut you just for looking at him the wrong way - arrives in London in his brand new motor at the beginning of 1922. Just a man come to see another man about a horse.

 

\------

 

“I collected Freddie and Ada’s steamer tickets from the Cunard Office this afternoon”, Polly had said one night earlier that month when he'd got in, without looking up from the books. “They better get on that bloody boat this time, Tommy. That place must think we’re made of money.”

“We are.”

“Hm.”

“I saw her again today”, he’d said after a while, nursing his bloodied knuckles. “Grace.”

Polly looked up.

“At the tearooms. She was with a friend, back to me. Same coat. Same hair. Same...everything.”

She’d slowly handed him a cigarette.

“And I was sat there thinking: how hard can it be to be in two places at once? In France, they used to say that there was one of you there and one of you back home. So it didn’t matter where they buried you, after... Or if you got blown up, and they couldn’t find all of you. Because somehow a part of you always...stayed.”

Polly had looked down very hard at her fingers. “Careful, Tommy. Anyone would think you were religious.”

He’d just given her a wry smile. “Nah. Men like me don’t get second chances.”

 

\------

 

He meets the Earl and his associate at dusk at the hotel on Piccadilly.

They take a table upstairs in the restaurant with a view of the singers and band below. All around them girls waft in a haze of French perfume, escorting stringy, monocled aristocrats with whiskers and bow-ties. Tommy runs a surreptitious hand over his fringe as he takes his seat.

“You’ll find Jones at this address”, the Earl says after their lobsters arrive, slides a white card across the table. “Can’t stand to do business with the fellow myself. But he’s good at...moving things around, so to speak.” A supercilious smile.

Tommy takes the envelope, noting its gilt edges. “And Fraser?”

“Everything’s in position.”

“Good.”

As they fall silent, he becomes properly aware of the music for the first time. The chorus has melted away and there’s only one singer left on stage.

Dressed head to toe in black sequins and feathers, her voice cuts through him just as it did the night he shot the white horse, right between the eyes.

She’s bobbed and dyed her hair, but it’s marvellously, unmistakably her.

He looks back to the table as she disappears off stage. “What did it say her name was? In the programme.”

The associate casts a be-spectacled eye over it. “A ‘Miss Connie Mara’. Hails from Boston, apparently. Found her to be a little too-”

“Excuse me, gentlemen.”

Tommy takes the stairs two at a time and pushes his way through the crowds of people milling around the bar till he reaches the stage door, but there’s a security guard who stops him from going any further.

“Please, I know that woman-”

“That’s what they all say.”

“Look, just-” He can see a whirl of glitter in the corridor behind him, dancing girls running back and forth. He takes one of his business cards, scribbles the address he’s just been given on the back of it and wraps it in a five-pound note. “Just show her this, will you?”

 

\------

 

He knocks three times at the red door in Greek Street and is shown round the back to where Jones is sitting, waiting for him, with two of his men. The place is lit by a single lightbulb, thick with smoke. Tommy makes a mental note of the door to the alleyway outside.

“Mr. Shelby. I understand you’re in the market for a horse.” He pours him a Scotch and flicks water over the surface.

Tommy unbuttons his suit jacket and sits down carefully. “Do you have the cash? Then I happen to have something for you.”

“Now isn’t that a coincidence. Did my partners give you the arrangements?”

He nods. “There’s a shipment of ammunition arriving tomorrow morning by canal from Birmingham. The keys are here. My men’ll have that transferred to you, yours will take the cash to Fraser, we’ll pick her up ourselves.”

Jones takes the keys, then pretends to think carefully for a moment. “The thing is - tomorrow morning, it seems we’ll be in possession of both a caseload of stolen ammunition and a thoroughbred racehorse. Now I can’t see why we can’t just...cut out the middle man altogether.”

“You Brummie pikeys”, his right-hand man sneers, pulling back the safety on his gun and pointing it straight at him. “All the bloody same. No imagination.”

“Oh I don’t know, boys”, Tommy says evenly. “I’d bet that sometimes we Shelbys can be quite...unpredictable.”

Grace steps out into the light, pistol raised, just as Tommy draws his gun, and before the men know what has happened they both shoot.

Quick as a flash, the third man throws himself at Tommy’s outstretched arms, knocking him to the ground, and Grace has to duck as a chair comes crashing her way.

As he’s reaching inside his boot for a knife she takes aim and fires, one bullet straight to the forehead.

There’s silence for a moment as the dust settles around them.

“Grace.”

“Thomas”, she replies, out of breath, and gives him a hand up off the floor. Gestures to the three men, dead. “Who were they, anyway?”

He raises his eyebrows, straightens himself out. “Just some men who wanted to stop me from buying a horse.”

Taken with the sudden urge to kiss him, she does.

“How did you know you could trust me, Tommy?”

“I didn’t”, he admits, wrapping an arm around her. “I do now, though.”

“Come on”, she says, taking his hand again as a police whistle sounds on the road outside. “I know a place.”

 

\------

 

She brings him to a deserted little Neapolitan basement cafe on Wardour Street and orders them both a glass of amaretto in broken Italian while removing her fur stole and short, black wig.

“What?”, Grace asks innocently when she catches Tommy watching her.

They slide into a corner booth with their drinks. He lights them each a cigarette and they sit smoking for a moment, both revelling in the other’s unexpected company.

“May we all die twice”, he says eventually, raising his glass, and she smiles.

It was the Fenians who had come for her, that black night three years ago. No doubt they’d been fed her address by her old landlord or some disgruntled copper the moment they found out that she’d been the Chief Inspector’s mole, in return for the whisky they’d nicked on her information from the Shelby wharves. When she wouldn’t cooperate they’d thrown her, tied up and weighted down, into the Thames.

By some miracle of her training or just God-given luck she’d managed to claw her way out of her coat and drag herself with it to the bank. The police had found it, together with her Military Operations badge, around the body of a prostitute in Southwark a few days later.

He doesn’t ask how the whore had come to end up dead wearing Grace’s coat.

A cousin in Boston had paid for her safe passage and ‘Connie’ had found work there first as a barmaid, then as an actress (Tommy has to smile at this); musicals mostly, sending money back to Ireland. Now she’d made her own name as a nightclub singer in the States and she was on tour: Chicago, New York, London, then on to the Continent.

She was still afraid the IRA might uncover her somehow, or worse, come for her sister in Dublin.

“I leave for Paris in the morning”, she says finally, out of breath with the telling of it all.

“I’d made up my mind”, he says quickly. “I came looking for you in Camden the week that-”

“I’m sorry, Tommy. They wanted me to take them back to you, but I couldn’t.” The republicans had wanted all the Shelby brothers’ heads in retribution for what she’d done.

“You saved my life”, he says simply, and she blushes.

“So you’re investing in racehorses now, as well as bookies?”

He winces. “Trying to, anyway.”

“I read about you in the papers from time to time, you know. You’re doing well for yourself.”

“I’m alright.”

“Alright? The Shelby Club, the racetracks, the property...”

“Things are...harder without a secretary.”

She looks down. “And the Garrison? How’s Arthur?”

“Arthur’s...managing.” They both grin.

She glances over at the barman, watching for signs of trouble. “How long before the police get here, do you think?”

He considers, looks down casually at his pocket watch. “Oh, I’d say we’ve got another five minutes yet.”

“Tommy, where’ve you been?”, she whispers suddenly, eyes closed. “I don’t- I know that... I just mean, all this time I’ve wanted to come to find you, and couldn’t-”

“It’s alright, Grace, it’s alright”, he says, brushing a stray lock of blonde hair behind her ear. “We were neither of us where we were supposed to be.”

She kisses him again, long and deep.

“What’ll you do now?”

He shakes his head. “I left the car a couple of streets over. I should be able to lose them once I get onto the Euston Road. You?”

“I have to be back at the hotel ready to leave for Paris at midday tomorrow. But if anyone’s seen me go after those men, then...”

“The club could do with its own singer. Something regular - Saturday nights, maybe. With a band.”

“Tommy...”

“Look, you have - you’ll always have - what I don’t. Class. I can’t make a success of this business on my own, Grace, I just can’t. Whatever’s happened in the past... We can’t lose each other again. I need you with me. We all do.”

She falters, a hand on his shoulder.

Now or never. “The back seat’s empty, Grace. Harder to ask questions of a chauffeur escorting a duchess out of town, don’t you think?”

“If the IRA come for me in Birmingham-”

“My men won’t let them, I can assure you of that.”

“Well, your Aunt Polly will certainly kill me if I show my face in Small Heath again.”

“She’ll have to kill me first.”

Grace frowns and turns away from him, stubs out her cigarette.

“And here I thought offering to protect you from your aunt-in-law would be romantic.”

She turns back, decided. “I want a stake. In the company.”

“Done. Shelby Brothers and Co. And I’ll more than match what you were making over there. Now let’s get your coat-”

“Shelby and _Burgess_ ”, she says firmly.

“Deal”, he says without hesitation. Offers her a hand. They can hear the sound of men quickly descending the steps. “Now, we’re going to have to leave by that back entrance, and we’re going to have to run.” Shouting, banging at the front door.

“Are you ready, Grace?”, he asks, quickly buttoning up his suit.

She slips a gloved hand in his, smiles.

“I’m ready.”


End file.
